Two German Speeches
Two German Speeches
The chapter is divided in two parts. The first one, “The Second Thought,” is on the legacy of Hannah Arendt, which the author understands as a school of resistance to the gnostic premises of modernity, namely, that the dream of modernity is to free humankind from the chains of the mortal body and their worldly prison and to “spiritualize” the entire human experience. Modernity, however, was never able to free itself from the superstition that in the end everything will have to be One (one political system, one ideology, one rule). On the contrary, Arendt states forcefully that plurality is the law of the earth. The second part is called “The Language of Europe.” The true language that Europe should speak has been anticipated in Ramon Lull’s The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, where a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian decide to give up on the ultimate truth about God and continue their conversation on the basis of pure friendship.
Keywords: Hannah Arendt, communitas, gnosis, Ramon Llull, modernity, nihilism
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